The city of Aurora is looking to do work on Mastodon Lake at Phillips Park to improve water quality, stabilize the lake shore and make it more usable for recreation.
The project, which has a roughly $5 million price tag and is in the proposed 2026 city budget, could be primarily funded through a $4 million state grant the Aurora City Council is set to consider accepting at a meeting on Tuesday. City officials say the rest of the funds would come from the city’s storm sewer fund, so not from the city’s main operating fund that is proposed to have budget cuts and layoffs
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.“We are quite excited about what this is going to do for Mastodon Lake and Phillips Park in general,” Ian Wade of the city’s engineering division said at a meeting of the Aurora City Council’s Finance Committee last week.
Work would include mechanical dredging to get sediment out of the lake, making it less shallow, more clean and more usable, according to Wade.
A staff report about the project, included with last week’s meeting agenda online, said the lake being shallow makes it susceptible to warming, excessive nutrients and becoming overrun with algae and other vegetation, which looks bad and limits recreational activities like boating and fishing.
The project would also include work to stabilize the lake’s shoreline, which Wade said would help mitigate erosion and create cleaner, more accessible entry points to the water with stabilized limestone outcroppings.
Plus, a four- to seven-acre “urban filter strip” will help to filter stormwater that moves through the area and so improve the lake’s water quality, according to Wade.
He said other work at the lake would include creating “emergent wetlands” through 10,000 plantings, creating “micro pools” to create more depth at certain areas to encourage water flow and the installation of mechanical aerators that will move water to prevent stagnation, which is regularly seen at the lake now.
The city in recent years has been using herbicide to control plant growth and has vacuumed sediment near the intake of the Phillips Park Golf Course’s irrigation system, according to the staff report. But, staff said in the report, these are not long-term solutions to the problem.
The project is projected to cost around $4.5 million, but staff are also asking for a contingency of $500,000 in case costs end up higher, the staff report shows.
Aurora Director of Public Works Jason Bauer said last week that the project has actually been in the budget for a number of years to be paid from stormwater management funds, which are supported by water bills, not taxes.
At Tuesday’s Committee of the Whole meeting, Bauer said the project has been in the works since at least 2019. Things have been added to the scope of the project over time, he said, and final cost estimates are still being worked out.
The city originally was planning to pay for all of it with stormwater funds, he said, so the grant will just lower the amount the city has to pay.
The Finance Committee last week unanimously voted to recommend the acceptance of the $4 million state grant. On Tuesday, the Committee of the Whole placed it on the consent agenda of next week’s City Council meeting, so it is likely to pass.
Ald. Ted Mesiacos, 3rd Ward, said at the Finance Committee meeting last week that he was very excited about this project, which is within his ward. He also gave a shout out to state Rep. Barbara Hernandez, D-Aurora, for her help in pushing for this.